The Spectre of Structural Violence
There has been a lot of violence and also a lot of talk about
violence in this last month. It shouldn’t
come as a surprise because violence has underlined our Sri Lankan existence at
least throughout my life time. From the
time our band-playing triforces were transformed into killing machines in 1971,
guns military technology, poles, molotov cocktails and
bombs have been used by the forces, the
vigilantes and the so called ‘terrorist groups’ to wage destruction on the LTTE, on the JVP and against many local, minority
groups, the most recent being the Easter Sunday massacre of innocent civilians. We have assassinated a cohort of leaders,
starting with the much maligned SWRD Bandaranaike in 1956, and more recently Lalith Athulathmudali,
Gamini Dissanayake, Vijaya Kumaranatunga, Ranasinghe Premadasa, Neelan
Thiruchelvam, Nadaraja Raviraj, Lakshman Kadirigama, to name a few of the others.
We have seen the gruesome deaths of Richard de Zoysa, Lasantha Wickremetunga
and Wasim Thajudeen. In this violent
history, few if any perpetrators of violence have been called to account. Instead,
we have seen convicted murderers pardoned, and war crime allegations ignored, sometimes even rewarded, leading us as a
nation to believe that problems can be solved not through a system of justice
but through intimidation and destruction.
All this not withstanding the #GoHomeGota protest provided us with
a truly democratic vision of how citizens could air their grievances, raise
their voices, assertively and maybe aggressively, with humour and with derision,
but without the attendant destruction to lives and property. Authoritarian governments typically do not know how to deal with non-violent
onslaughts on their legitimacy, and the Rajapakse government was no exception. Their
attempts to provoke the protestors to act in ways that would justify violent
suppression failed repeatedly . Neither the burning bus in Mirihana, nor
the riot police sent to Galle Face nor even the
killing of a protestor in Rambukkana sparked a violent reaction. That is not
until the 9th of May. On
that day, even as Aragalaya supporters celebrated the resignation of Prime
Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, “one down four to go”, SLPP goons attacked the
protestors in #MainaGoGama and in #GotaGoGama and the country erupted in a spate
of retaliatory violence against SLPP supporters. Houses were burnt, property was destroyed,
and some SLPP supporters humiliated in a style that has been described as “the discarding of the core-values of
resistance, decency, mercy, and non-excess”.
Thankfully and curiously, the
damage to property was far greater than the damage to life.
In this land of conspiracy theorists the jury is out on who the
perpetrators of the violence were. The
GGG (GotaGoGama) stalwarts are adamant that the violence did not emanate from
their midst. Yet their credibility as a
non-violent group of changemakers has been eroded. The retaliatory violence “[damaged]the
heart winning image of peaceful protest demonstrated by aragalaya”.
Even as the newly appointed Prime Minister blindsided the protestors, and different
political groupings, some with violent histories, claimed leadership in the
GGG, the legitimacy of this peoples’ resistance movement is in danger of being
gradually invalidated, at least among Sri Lanka’s privileged classes.
No act of violence that creates fear, takes lives and destroys property
can ever be condoned. But as the army
tanks roll along the streets of Colombo and other towns, we need to recognise
that committing acts of violence is not the prerogative of the mobs nor of armed
forces. It is not only the arson and the
thuggery, the shooting and the bombs, that create fear, take lives and destroy
property. There are many indirect, insidious, egregious forms of violence that
are meted out by those with economic, political and social power and through the
institutions of our society. In Sri
Lanka, as in many other parts of the world,
these forms of violence have generated fear and helplessness among the
underprivileged, destroyed whatever assets they had, assaulted their dignity as
human beings and citizens, and taken a toll on their lives and
livelihoods.
John
Galtung the Norwegian sociologist, sees violence as present when human
beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental
realisations are below their potential realisations[1] In
other words when people’s potential reality (what they could have been)
is different from their actual circumstances (what they are). He illustrates it
very clearly when he says that if someone died of tuberculosis in the 18th
century, it would be hard to consider it violent because it might have been unavoidable. But if someone died today of TB, with all the
medical advances to prevent it and treat it, that in his definition, would be an expression
of violence. This concept of ‘structural
violence’ as it is called, has also been
taken up by other writers on violence such as Paul Farmer, James
Gilligan.
In the last few months in
Sri Lanka we have seen almost an everyday expression of this type of structural
violence. Social media is full of stories
of older citizens collapsing under the
weight of gas cylinders they are carrying or dying of heat exhaustion in the queues,
infants and children losing their lives because families failed to get them to
hospital in time because of the lack of fuel.
In this situation the perpetrators of this violence are easily
identified, an irresponsible government led by an equally irresponsible and
uncaring President. But even as law enforcement
is moving, albeit slowly, selectively and could even be unfairly, to punish who
they see as the perpetrators of the May 9th mob violence, the murder
and manslaughter of citizens by depriving them of the basic necessities of life
and placing them in conditions that make it hard for them to survive, goes on unpunished.
Many of the Sri Lankans who are reeling most under pressure today have
experienced a much longer history of such structural violence, not just harms
to their physical wellbeing, but also psychological assaults to their minds and
psyche. Foremost in my mind are the
families of Sri Lanka’s forcibly disappeared, allegedly 60,000 to 100,000 persons
from all ethnic groups since the 1980s.[2] Without
knowing the truth about their missing family member, these families cannot
properly mourn their loss, seek justice and reparation for the crimes against their
missing loved one, and run the danger of intimidation and further victimisation
for seeking the truth.
Another group are the victims of the post-war beautification and gentrification
of Colombo as a ‘world class city’ that sought
to make Colombo a slum-less (note, not poverty-less) visual space. These residents of Colombo’s ‘underserved settlements’ were forcibly evicted from their residences
and intimidated when they sought legal redress.
The homes that they had invested in were destroyed and they were
allocated new high rise accommodation where they felt crammed, insecure, lacking
mutual support structures and community more than anything else, compromising their
participation in urban life. The lands that were wrangled away from them, in
the meantime, were made ready for commercial use and investment[3].
Then there is the Meethotamulla rubbish dump that collapsed in
2017 damaging houses and killing 26 people[4]. The people of the area had been complaining about
the dump for years and in 2015 instigated a lawsuit that sought to close the
dump. More than 15 protests were held
and on three occasions the protestors were attacked, and twice people were arrested.
Women seeking to start enterprises or build homes after the war in
the northern provinces, faced a different form of violence from aggressive microfinance
companies who seized the opportunity to market
their loan schemes, trapping these women
into horrifying cycles of indebtedness.[5]
And if you add to all this the intimidation of individuals (such
as the arbitrary arrest of lawyer Hejaaz Hisbullah, or the Kurunegala gyneacologist
accused of involuntary sterilisations), the forced cremations during COVID
including that of a 20 month baby, the sexual harassment, the gender based
violence, the vilification of garment workers as ‘Juki girls’, the exploitation
of the plantation worker community, the vulnerability of families forced to
live on landslide prone unstable hillsides, the draonian PTA etc etc , - the
stories of a society exercising structural
violence on its citizens occupying the
bottom rungs of the social ladder, are legion.
Right now, our priority is to relieve the immense suffering that
has been caused by the economic crisis, to obtain dollars urgently and “to find and cling to
ordinary every day decency, kindness and empathy that are in us” But we also need to closely examine the paths we take to
economic recovery and ensure that the decisions we make will not compound in
the long run, the dispossession and lack of agency of the women and men without power and privilege. As citizens we can regain the decency, kindness
and empathy that we may have lost recently, but we also need to work on eradicating the systemic
structural violence inherent in our social structures and institutions. This is not the kind of violence that is
readily visible to the privileged
because we are rarely at the receiving end of it. But it is nevertheless a violence that creates
fear, takes lives and destroys property just like the mobs did on May 9th.
Professor Jayadeva Uyangoda has described
the #GoHomeGota protests as “a
rare moment of Sri Lankan citizens’ political awakening. They are now asserting
their public duty to the common good of the larger political community. Young
citizens in large numbers are spearheading this new movement of resistance and
political hope. This is Sri Lanka’s long awaited moment of democracy.” My young
friend with two kids and one on the way,
in the throes of the Aragalaya from its very start described the movement
of the coming together of a previously
atomised society, no longer divided on ethnic, religious, class and age lines, with collective leadership and an organic
development of strategy.as “ALL of us,
doing our tiny tiny bits, to create a masterpiece.”
Making the most of our moment
of democracy, and scaling up rather than destroying the masterpiece that is
the Aragalaya, means arresting the structural violence inherent in our
inegalitarian and majoritarian society. The alternative would mean tearing ourselves apart.
[1] Galtung,
Johan. "Violence, Peace, and Peace Research" Journal of Peace Research,
Vol. 6, No. 3 (1969), pp. 167-191
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa37/5853/2017/en/
[3] https://ssalanka.org/colombos-gentrification-right-city-neoliberalism-hasini-lecamwasam/
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/world/asia/sri-lanka-garbage-dump.html
[5] https://www.firstpost.com/world/as-communities-in-north-east-sri-lanka-drown-in-debt-government-struggles-to-regulate-micro-finance-4853241.html
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